"US Secretary of State John Kerry has reportedly promised his Venezuelan counterpart to close NATO airspace to the country's flights and stop crucial oil product deliveries if Caracas grants asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Last Friday night, just hours after Venezuela agreed to provide political asylum to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Kerry personally called Venezuela Foreign Minister Elias Jauaw..."

"The Department of Justice told a federal court this week that the NSA 'cannot be challenged in a court of law.' Also this week, the Department of Justice told a federal court that the courts cannot review the legality of the government's assassination by drone of Americans abroad."

"The world is witnessing the creation of a new world order that involves the security state apparatus as an overwhelming force, Julian Assange said during his speech at OHM 2013, Observe, Hack, Make Conference.

'We are seeing the doubling of the power of the national security agency every four years,' Assange said..."

"...Obama revealed himself once again as a mediocre politician and an incompetent negotiator. Putin devoured him as a succulent serving of eggs benedict. Glenn Greenwald will be inflicting death by a thousand leaks - because he is in charge of Snowden's digital treasure chest.

For the moment, what we have is an Orwellian/Panopticon complex that will persist with its unchecked powers; an aphasic populace; a quiet invisible man in a Moscow multitude; and a POTUS consumed with boundless rage.

"...the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc's Android software to record conversations, one former US official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing..."

The U.S. government wants American police agents working in Canada exempted from Canadian law. If this is a surprise, it shouldn’t be.

The secret American demand was unearthed this week by Canadian Press reporters looking into Ottawa’s much ballyhooed border deal with the U.S.

Announced in 2011, the so-called North American perimeter security pact would give Washington the right to have its agents and police officers operate alongside their Canadian counterparts within Canada.

In return, the Americans have said they’ll make it easier for trucks to travel back and forth across the border between the two countries.

While details of the pact remain sparse, it appears to give American agents working in so-called “integrated teams” the power of Canadian peace officers — including the right to carry weapons and use them on Canadian soil.

The Conservative government has said only that U.S. agents operating in Canada will be involved in “intelligence and criminal investigations” and that uniformed U.S. officers will help patrol the land border from the Canadian side.

Theoretically, Canadian agents could operate with similar powers in the U.S. in order to provide an appearance of reciprocity.

“This declaration is not about sovereignty,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said when he announced the new arrangement two years ago.

"GCHQ forced them to destroy technical equipment or hand over information relating to the case of Edward Snowden. Guardian editor, Alan Rushbridger says the paper will continue to 'do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents.' There has been no comment from GCHQ.."

loyal journalists seem to believe in a duty to politely submit to bullying tactics from political officials

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger on Monday night disclosed the remarkable news that UK authorities, several weeks ago, threatened the Guardian UK with prior restraint if they did not destroy all of their materials provided by Edward Snowden, and then sent agents to the basement of the paper's offices to oversee the physical destruction of hard drives. The Guardian has more details on that episode today, and MSNBC's Chris Hayes interviewed the Guardian's editor-in-chief about it last night. As Rusbriger explains, this behavior was as inane as it was thuggish: since this is 2013, not 1958, destroying one set of a newspaper's documents doesn't destroy them all, and since the Guardian has multiple people around the world with copies, they achieved nothing but making themselves look incompetently oppressive.

But conveying a thuggish message of intimidation is exactly what the UK and their superiors in the US national security state are attempting to accomplish with virtually everything they are now doing in this matter. On Monday night, Reuters' Mark Hosenball reported the following about the 9-hour detention of my partner under a terrorism law, all with the advanced knowledge of the White House:...

"On Thursday, September 19th, 2013 I received this phone call from Agent Francois Allard of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service...

'It kind of creeped me out,' said [Clifton] Nicholson, who travels in 'left leaning and anarchist circles' and he hung out with communists and anarchists while he was in Greece attending a festival in Athens."

"In fact, the elite's silence about the CSEC is only the follow-up to the concerted disinformation campaign that Canada's Conservative government mounted after the Globe and Mail revealed in early June that CSEC has been mining the metadata of Canadian electronic communications - including telephone and cell-phone calls, emails and text messages - since at least 2005.

Recently, the NDP held several press conferences to discuss the issues it intends to raise in the coming parliamentary session. Not once did it make any reference to the undemocratic clandestine operations of CSEC..."

"France has called for an explanation for the 'unacceptable' and 'shocking' reports of NSA spying on French citizens. Leaked documents revealed the spy agency records millions of phone calls and monitors politicians and high profile business people.

The US Ambassador to France Charles Rivkins was summoned to the French Foreign Ministry to account for the espionage allegations on Monday morning..."

No such complaints or outrage against US surveillance in its Canadian satrapy.

"This ultra-secret government installation is being built by private enterprise with private money raised on the open market. Greenwald said he is preparing to release more classified documents from Snowden outting government spying here and Canada's intimate relationship with the NSA..."

The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.

The agency's internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations....

"The leaked NSA document being reported exclusively by CBC News reveals Canada is included with the huge American intelligence agency in clandestine surveillance activities in 'approximately 20 high priority countries.'

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake says the problem is that both CSEC and the NSA lack proper oversight and without it, they have morphed into runaway surveilance.

'There is a clear and compelling danger to democracy in Canada by virtue of how far these secret surveillance operations have gone."

"...Needless to say, the NDP, Liberals and for that matter the Green and Bloc Quebecois, have not alerted Canadians to the significance of the Snowden revelations and of CSEC's intimate role in the NSA's global spy network, let alone drawn the crucial political inferences concerning CSEC's complicity in illegality and indifference and hostility to Canadians' democratic rights."

Snowden: "Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights."

In the biggest legal blow to the National Security Council since the dragnet spying scandal broke in June, a federal judge ruled Monday that the U.S. government "almost certainly" violated the constitution by mass collecting data on nearly every single phone call within or to the United States.

“Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights," declared NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in a statement on the ruling released by journalist Glenn Greenwald Monday afternoon. "It is the first of many."....

"In this blockbuster, no holds barred conversation, Sibel Edmonds, Guillermo Jimenez and James Corbett discuss Edmonds' recent series of articles on Glenn Greenwald and his connection to Pierre Omidyar. We talk about the NSA/PayPal connection and Greenwald's refusal to discuss this issue..."

"The chilling ruling from Justice Richard Mosley, of of the country's most respected security experts, is a stinging indictment of the way CSIS operates along with its partner, The Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC).

Someone must answer for the spy agency's attempt to game the court..."

"...This pressure for targeted killings is likely to increase, says Michael Richardson, a former counterterrorism official at Canada's foreign affairs department.

'The problem with capturing suspects is you need to convict them in a court of law. It's much tidier all around if you just do away with them. The legal system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. We're not going to get that. Intelligence is not ever without reasonable doubt...'

It is becoming ever more clear that the austerity policies applied in the periphery of the EU are part of a wider and more ambitious experiment of social engineering, a sort of neoliberal laboratory where new modes of governmentality are being tested before being generalized to the rest of the Eurozone. This is obviously not a prophecy or an inevitable outcome, since it depends on several factors and is open for questioning; but rather an attempt to devise a recognizable pattern in different national contexts, a logic behind the major political decisions, and a strategic horizon that enables us to struggle against capitalist austerity without struggling for capitalist development.

The new modes of governmentality that are taking shape imply the transference of fundamental components of sovereignty from national elected governments to international institutions; the commodification of aspects of social life previously guaranteed by state provision or produced in common; the transformation of political choices in technical imperatives crystallized in law; and the reinforcement of the repressive state apparatus. They require the suspension of both democracy and the rule of law, as a condition to cut down what remains of the welfare state and establish a high profit rate for capital investors.

The breaking up of more resilient forms of working class militancy through repression of strikes and union picketing, along with the renewed persecution of those who survive on the margins of capitalist society (immigrants, but not only immigrants) through a wide set of extra-legal activities, are different sides of a process that also includes the widespread development of firms of private security and the militarization of civil police, the multiplication of CCTV surveillance in sensitive urban areas, and a harder legal punishment for minor crimes (such as shoplifting). If we add to all this the reinforcement of the far-right and the pre-emptive criminalization of anarchist and radical left ideas, methods and organizations, we get a clear picture of the state of exception that came to stay: an economy of fear is fundamental to this regime of accumulation.

"Has it been only 10 months since Edward Snowden's NSA revelations changed the world? Can you even remember what the world was like, before he gave 50,000--no, 200,000--no, wait, 2 million--secret documents to Glenn Greenwald: smoking guns that exposed Washington's global surveillance state...

Isn't it wonderful how much has changed since those days when we discovered the spine and musculature of the surveillance state that undergirded this ghastly system of murder and corruption and domination?